Obama urges peace talks between Israel, Palestine

PHOTOS: Obama's Israel trip

After four of the frostiest years in over six decades of U.S.-Israel relations, the two leaders are taking pains to send friendlier signals — in part because Obama will be around for another four years, in part because centrist and left-leaning parties in Israel unexpectedly elbowed their way into Netanyahu’s hawkish coalition during elections in January.

“For this, you need, you see, a second term as president and a third term as prime minister. That really fixes things,” Netanyahu said in response to a question about Obama’s standing in Israel.

The two men seemed to go out of their way to appear chummy Wednesday at a press conference, trading jokes about their children’s good looks, and working hard to seem aligned no matter the question or the issue that came up.

Repeatedly, Netanyahu tried to reassure a skittish Israeli public that the president is more of an ally than many of them think, batting away the skepticism at one point with a simple, “People should get to know President Obama the way I’ve gotten to know him.”

There’s no missing the change.

“Netanyahu has been able to get a bump every time he says no to the president. When he upbraided him in the Oval Office, he got a 10 percent rise in the Israeli public opinion. That is unheard of,” said Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, during a roundtable discussion in Washington last week.

“Netanyahu, [who] eats polls for breakfast, he knows very well what the standing of the president is and what his own standing is,” said Indyk, who predicted “a more pliant Netanyahu” more open to Obama’s suggestions on settlements and Palestine.

The result, Indyk said, is a “very careful, very sensitive, very praiseworthy” Netanyahu which will help the prime minister’s poll numbers because “the public doesn’t like the idea that their prime minister doesn’t have a good relationship with the president.”

In the push-and-pull of their relationship, Obama has less incentive to give ground. Appetite for another armed conflict in the Mideast is low, and resentments linger. But the president is still eager to stave off an Israeli military strike that could unleash violence around the region. The only way to do that may be to convince Netanyahu to trust him.

”Obama’s got the most dysfunctional relationship with any Israeli prime minister in the history of the U.S.-Israeli relationship,” former State Department official Aaron David Miller said on MSNBC Monday. “Benjamin Netanyahu bears an enormous amount of responsibility for that.”

“It was a bad four years from a personality point of view. Now, they know they’ve got to work together for another four years,” says Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security under President George W. Bush. “How about trying a fresh start? From the point of view of both governments, that’s very sensible [and] timely.”

It isn’t only about fresh starts, it’s about a rapidly shifting political landscape in Israel. The Israeli elections augur a generational shift towards politicians of Obama’s age or younger, if not always the president’s progressive point of view.